1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic photography. An embodiment relates to a camera system with a plurality of lens units for using super-resolution techniques. Another embodiment refers to a lens and colour filter arrangement for such a camera system. Further embodiments refer to a method of operating a camera system using super-resolution and to a method of manufacturing such a camera system.
2. Description of Related Art
A conventional digital camera uses a colour filter array arranged over a sensor array such that each image pixel is associated with a particular filter colour and each image pixel signal relates to one colour, for example to either red, green or blue. Accordingly, the number of pixels assigned to each colour is only a subset of all available image pixels. To obtain a full resolution image for each filter colour, demosaicing methods estimate or interpolate missing pixel values from the pixel values of the surrounding pixels for each filter colour. A method of demosaicing using successive approximation is described in Xin Li; “Demosaicing by Successive Approximation”; IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 14, No. 3, March 2005. Further in the field of electronic photography, compound-eye cameras are known that include lens arrays to obtain a plurality of low-resolution images on a photo detector, each of the low-resolution images representing shifted versions of the same scene. EP 1 699 233 A1 refers to a method of estimating a single high-resolution image from a plurality of low-resolution images.
Sina Farsiu et al., “Multi-Frame Demosaicing and Super-Resolution of Colour Images”, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 141-159, January 2006 refers to a general model for imaging systems merging super-resolution and demosaicing into one process.